Blogs: Get Your Words Out

By  Michael W. Muchmore, ExtremeTech
PC Magazine

September 17, 2002

A grassroots, low-cost approach to Web publishing is sweeping the globe: blogs. Short for Web log, the blog phenomenon has been popularized by writers ranging from former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan to your niece commenting about her first year in college. Blogs are chronologically organized online journals that can contain intimate biographical musings, accounts of technology, political analyses, or just ramblings about movies or TV shows. They often include images, creative layouts, and plenty of links. Blogdex (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) attempts to index all of these blogs, arranging them according to which ones are most often linked to other sites. At Weblogs.Com, you'll find another list of popular online journals.

What, you may ask, does all this have to do with content management? It turns out that blogs aren't just for you to tell the world what kind of sandwich you had for lunch yesterday. Software and services for updating blogs offer some basic content management features at a negligible cost. For small companies and schools, blogging is an effective and simple way to share and store strategies, experiences, and plans. In fact, software developer Macromedia has started using blogs as an informal way for its managers to communicate with customer-developers.

In the beginning (about 1997) bloggers simply uploaded their journals the way you'd post a Web page: by coding the correct HTML and transmitting the file to the Web server. But the same techies who used blogging for rarefied technological discussions created tools that make keeping an online journal up to date easy for anyone. Blog tools provide simple forms for entering text or images, and they let you update a site with a single mouse click. They usually archive your posts as well, and some offer scheduled posting or team features. Here's a list of popular blogging tools:

BigBlogTool (www.bigblogtool.com) has a Windows application for editing your blog that costs $13 per year including site hosting.

Blogger (www.blogger.com) is Web-based and offers free blog building and hosting; $50 per year for the Pro version, which adds images and scheduled posts.

Greymatter (http://noahgrey.com/greysoft) is a free, open-source local application. It has image uploading, a comments feature, and templates.

GrokSoup (www.groksoup.com) is a free Web-based blogging tool with a news focus.

LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) is an open-source blog project with both an online and a downloadable updating tool. A calendar is standard issue.

Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) requires uploading CGI scripts to your Web server, but it's free, unless you decide to make a contribution.

Pitas.com is a free, easy-to-use, but basic Web-based blog builder and host.

pMachine 2.1 (www.pmachine.com)—the "p" stands for publishing—offers far more features than most blogging tools but requires you to add code to your hosting Web server. A feature-limited free version is available; a noncommercial license is $45, and a commercial one is $125.

Radio UserLand (www.userland.com) is a local server program that lets you edit and upload your blog to a site it hosts for you. It's priced at $39.95.

Slashcode (www.slashcode.com) is a free, sophisticated open-source tool with capabilities close to full-blown content management; it powers the techie site Slashdot (www.slashdot.org).

Xanga.com offers free Web-based blog editing and hosting; a premium editor costs $25 a year.